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retroworks writes: "Telecom giants AT&T and Verizon Communications are lobbying states, one by one, to hang up the plain, old telephone system, what the industry now calls POTS — the copper-wired landline phone system whose reliability and reach made the U.S. a communications powerhouse for more than 100 years. Is landline obsolete, and should be immune from grandparents-era social protection? The article continues, 'Last week, Michigan joined more than 30 other states that have passed or are considering laws that restrict state-government oversight and eliminate "carrier of last resort" mandates, effectively ending the universal-service guarantee that gives every U.S. resident access to local-exchange wireline telephone service, the POTS. (There are no federal regulations guaranteeing Internet access.) ... In Mantoloking, N.J., Verizon wants to replace the landline system, which Hurricane Sandy wiped out, with its wireless Voice Link. That would make it the first entire town to go landline-less, a move that isn't sitting well with all residents."

So we give up something we've had for years, and in exchange we get to keep something we've had for years? And what happens when they come back in five years saying Net Neutrality is just too much of a burden? What do we give up in ransom next?

You guys in the US have had net neutrality for years? News to me. I thought you had this watered down thing where the ISP's along with major peers were giving the thin veneer of that, while saying they're not shaping traffic while slapping in sandvine boxes all the while. I know that it's what Rogers, Bell and Telus were doing in Canada for quite awhile until the CRTC, Industry Canada and the Feds smacked them around.

As a network administrator, I can guarantee you that traffic shaping *is* necessary.

Just like in "real life" you drive at a certain speed, and traffic lights decide which cars pass and which ones have to wait.

Just like in "real life" certain vehicles have priority above all (ambulances).

Expecting a fully unregulated internet is dumb. No matter how much capacity you can add to YOUR network, there will still be a bottleneck somewhere. And you really don't want ICMP queueing up at that point, or Bad Things® happen.

And you really don't want SMTP to have the same priority as HTTP. You really don't need that email to arrive in a second. It can take 10, 20, 30 seconds. It can take a minute, and that's OK. But your web browsing can't wait 10, 20, 30 seconds.

Let's not be fools. Traffic shaping IS a need. I get where you're coming from (priorizing one company over another) but it's silly to think it should be completely unrestricted. Real life isn't. Why should the internet be?

1. Traffic Shaping *CAN* be done in a Network Neutral way. If all RTP traffic is higher than all SMTP traffic (regardless if the RTP traffic is from my house to a friend and the SMTP traffic is from Comcast), then you have preserved NETWORK (not traffic) neutrality. I think this is acceptable to most people that support Network Neutrality.

2. Traffic Shaping should only be used in bursts. If you are using it for hours at a time, BUY MORE CAPACITY. I've yet to see any shaping that works as well as more capacity.In other words, if your ISP is saturated every night between suppertime and bedtime, they need more capacity.If they use shaping to make sure a sudden burst of downloads for the latest Apple iOS updates don't impact VoIP and Video RTP for their customers, that is a good thing.

The difference is you are using traffic shaping to make your network work better. The major ISPs want to use traffic shaping to make the network work worse. (in order to extract money from content providers.)

The problem with your suggestion is that, like every other American, you have no fucking idea what true network neutrality looks like or how to implement it. What you would ask for, and if you got it what the rest of us would then have to endure, would NOT be network neutrality. One election cycle is all it would take to whisk away the facade and return us to business as usual.

If you are going to get Rid of POTS what we really need more then Net Neutrality is to be sure we have an infrastructure for its replacement.AKA make sure everyone has access to fiber before you get rid of pots.

Nearly every American household has a phone line to their home, even if they don't use it it is there. However most people do not have a fiber optic connection to their home, and Wireless is very spotty.

Get us connectivity with a choice of carriers then we can talk Net Neutrality.

Yea, try to relocate a rural resident without a shotgun pointed at you.So farmers shouldn't get internet access while their operation is just a technical as many other companies it's size. Or the case rural home prices are cheaper, less violent crime, quieter areas with better school.No let's all move to a dangerous, crowded, smelly, and expensive city. Where my quality of life is much lower just so I can have basic/modern communication service.

In the real world, ISPs rely on laying cables, and allowing any schmuck to lay cables throughout your neighborhood is a recipe for disaster. Realizing this, a competent (ie, non-Randroid) local government would require the companies that lay cables to sell usage of their cables at a fair price to competitors to promote healthy competition. Unfortunately, Randroids rule the day, and the companies that are allowed to lay cables cannot be burdened with regulations because ARGLE BARGLE FREE MARKET, and so we are in the situation that we are in.

Yeah, people who pay for the cables, the installation, the maintenance, and the repair should be forced to allow the competition on their infrastructure even though it might interfere with their operation. I mean, we need to control who can lay cables and only allow our biggest political contributors and/or the highest bidder to lay infrastructure. Because Randroids HARG ARGLE BLARGLE...

You don't understand the principle, the cables belong to a cable company, the content transported over them to a media, internet or phone company and they all pay their share to the owner of the cables.

Over here in The Netherlands that's a quite common scenario and it works fine but it does require there are no legal obstacles in the way and net neutrality is a must.

Like some towns were fed up waiting for a company to lay cable so they financed a non-profit to do so.

And in perfect world a non-profit, probably government-financed organisation would build those and then lease them to private companies. That way no one has the stranglehold on competition and private business can actually flourish instead of being strangled by private monopolies with power to bully everyone, including law makers into doing what they want to be done.

In the actual real world (outside of your worker's paradise) having companies lay their own cable works better, because otherwise there's no incentive for the company that owns the cable to keep overhead expenses down. That's the way it was done in my town, and it works quite well.

'Free', as in the freedom to buy a thing, or not buy a thing; the freedom to pick and choose among various styles and vendors of that thing...
There's no freedom here; I have to have internet access to my house, on just about the same level as I need power and water. Going without it is not an option. And as far as the kind of internet access I need, there's really just one of those too; and it's called 'Fast Enough'.

'Market', as in more than one store to buy something at. There's no market here; I have to buy that internet access from whatever cable comes to by house, regardless of what they call themselves this week. I will give you that where FIOS has overlapped cable, you have a market of 2. (I won't count DSL) And yes, we see temporary price wars, but I'm not fooled into thinking that it's a healthy 'market', or that it's good for me in any way in the long run.

There is no free market, and to try to fake one, pisses me off as a conservative. It's a utility already, and access to it needs to be 'owned', in the physical sense, by the government, or the people. Cities should probably administer it at a municipal level; Co-Ops are great for more rural areas. Maybe county, or even state. Whatever works best for for your locality as a voter, with as much right to internet access, as the right to have power and running water to your house.

The only hesitation that I have, is that it's early, and standardizing on something like fiber optic might be like Edison jumping on DC too early. Plus, the existing infrastructures would have to be bought out; the government can preeminent domain take something to a point, but the takee has to be paid. The moment such a law passed, but long before unprepared municipalities would be ready; investment money would flee the space instantly, resulting in chaos. The opponents would use that to their advantage, and would probably win.

Still, I can't wait for ISPs to be taken over by the people, and the term replaced with lowercase 'isp', an anachronism referring to a particular type of hookup to the internet.

Having multiple redundant links is a good thing. Tell you what, we'll do it your way, but only after three competing companies have each laid their own cable provided that all three of them are running fiber optics from end to end.

Right now we're doing it your way, and the cable company gets to say "Oh gee look, I'm already here, guess nobody else can build now so I get to dictate terms to the market. Thank you mr politician, here's your bribe money."

I REAL capitalism, when you screw over your customers, they leave you and go to the competition. In fake capoitalism (read government controlled), you're pretty much the only game in town and have a protected monopoly and can screw your customers with impunity.... Kinda like the current utilities system we have.

In real capitalism, you make sure there is no competition left before you screw over your customers. Being good capitalists does mean using any means to destroy your competition and government is a good tool, fairly cheap and well armed.

Here in the UK, our governments certainly have had many failings but your attitude is completely alien to our way of life.

Over here, we understand that the best way to have real freedom and competition is to have more than one powerful competitor and the government actually works to make sure that happens.

In the town I live in, there are two major supermarkets within 5-10 minutes walking distance of each other and there's another major one on the outskirts of town. If one of them does something stupid, then

That "inspection at the door" works both ways. On several occasions, Costco inspectors have noticed I forgot to pick up my Forever stamps, etc. Two of them are among the friendliest staff in the whole store, and if they catch someone taking stuff then that translates into them keeping MY prices down. Everything about Costco comes across as "a great and fair deal for all", and yet that is the only store I exit that checks my receipt.

I question the sincerity of your response, but can agree with the point that different inspections have different levels of gain for both parties.
Parents checking the texts on their kid's phone can learn quite a bit, and this is a good thing, even if the child would freak if she found out.

Your local auto repair shop is probably looking for extra work when they tell you your radiator could use a flush. But this is a relationship, that can work both ways. If they report stuff as broken that ain't, you f

I hear bagpipes! You are using the same no true Scotsman fallacy that the communists employ when every real life attempt at implementing it fails to produce a utopia. The communists will claim that true communism can only exist when the government ceases to exist. Funny how you libertarians are making the exact same argument with capitalism, blaming the very existence of a government for its failures.

There are big problems with the switch. The old analog phone lines were powered by the -48 Volt signal DC voltage from the phone company switching stations, which had very reliable backup power and facilities to cut off phones that were accidentally left off hook and kept draining current from the batteries or secondary generators. All this has evaporated in the modern cable modem/FIOS/internaet/land line era. Each house needs its own local battery or other power supply to keep the phones active, and each buried switch needs its own power, and many cut-rate DSL or phone companies are skimping on the quality and size of these backup power systems. The result is much more fragile, and phone service is much less reliable than the old analog system. That old analog system was _amazing_ in its ability to survive natural disasters and still provide _some_ phone service, even if only to a few homes in a neighborhood.

The fundamental problem is that POTS sucks by any definition, but it rarely fails suddenly and catastrophically in areas where the phone lines are mostly underground (I don't know about the rest of the US, but in Florida, there are a LOT of places where the phone lines are buried, even though the power lines aren't). Most of what you describe is progressive deterioration over relatively long periods of time. Wireless networks, in contrast, tend to lose power suddenly, and stay down for at least the remainder of whatever catastrophe caused the failure in the first place.

Twenty years ago, it was almost UNHEARD of in Florida to actually lose phone service during anything short of an Andrew-like hurricane... and even in Andrew, few people actually lost phone service. When they did, it was almost always due to catastrophic destruction of their own home's demarc box. Two years ago, half of Dade & Broward county lost Comcast & U-verse for half the day during a GODDAMN TROPICAL STORM (Isaac) that didn't even hit us directly. In fact, it seems like the most disruptive storms are, in fact, "slow & sloppy" tropical storms that have enough gusts to knock out commercial power early in the storm, then leave the area in limbo for another day and a half as the storm slowly passes through the area.

You've got your capitalisms reversed. Fake capitalism, aka "fantasy capitalism" is when you screw over your customers, they leave you and go to the competition. This scenario of a just world largely only exists in the imagination of libertarians. Real capitalism with unregulated markets inevitably leads to monopolies as more and more wealth gets concentrated into the hands of fewer and fewer people as competitors eventually get bought out.

I have several family members without access to any network than can support VoIP. Another's only choice is LTE via HomeFusion from Verizon. 30GB for $130 a month. Have you tried running a modern family of 6 people (each with their own tablet, phone, and then the varied internet connected devices like DVRs and consoles) on 30GB? It sucks.

If they mandate unlimited LTE at a reasonable price or mandate fiber optic instead, then I agree this would be great & we should kill POTS.

That's not a bad idea. I don't know if you meant truly universal, or "full coverage in the affected area". I think it would be fine to allow an experiment in a town that has had the POTS infrastructure already wiped out, if the town has at least two competing VoIP or wireless carriers with full coverage in the town.

If it works okay in the town that had already lost POTS due to the hurricane, the same policy could be tried elsewhere. The phone company could drop POTS service in the county only if that leav

I suspect in certain areas that would indeed be costly for the telco. They'd have to balance that cost against the cost of laying and maintaining copper if they had to cover the entire county. Would they rather keep providing copper to the whole county, or switch to providing fiber or wireless to the county? Either way, the entire county has service.

A big thing is that they don't get to define 'coverage'. Too many areas they claim are covered have terrible and unreliable service. To be covered, it needs to have x signal strength INSIDE each and every home all the time. No dropped calls at all, and no drop outs.

In other words, it needs to be at least as good as properly maintained copper. That also means they will need to have several days of backup power at each cell tower.

And since it costs a lot less than POTS to install and maintain, we expect it to cost less than POTS service. Note that in many areas they will need a low cost voice only unlimited minutes for a flat fee rate.

I'm in a big sparse country so not quite the same as the States but if I lost my land line I'd be out of contact. No cell service as I'm 40 miles outside of a city that including suburbs only has a million and half people and internet comes over that land line at a whole 3KB/s. Satellites are behind mountains and trees and lots of rain as well.

The price of a land line as far as I know is capped so even remote locations will be able to afford one. Not only that, but I believe that almost every location should be able to get a land line at this price and telcos are mandated to provide that service.

If telcos want to go wireless, they are essentially talking about getting the "last mile" out of the equation. How they get (voice) data from and to the neighborhoods isn't mandated. This has already led to phone systems being out on the fritz when they are most needed, because phone companies decided to cheapskate on things like electrical power availability, line of sight and such. The telephone system has helped keep communications going for disaster areas throughout the last 100 years or so with varying amounts of success. Lets at least get them to do it properly if they are ever allowed to replace it so people can be certain it's affordable and it will work even in disaster circumstances when the reliability is required most.

With carriers having overcharged over 300 billion [newnetworks.com] who is then on the hook if there are no more landline companies? Of course telcom giants want people only on wireless, Verizon has been selling off their landline business for years.

I haven't kept up with the laws the last decade but the ILECs - incumbent local exchange carrier - were the equivalent of government mandated monopolies. Telco reform act of '96 forced the ILECs to share the publicly paid for infrastructure with startup phone companies. The Internet exploded with thousands of ISPs popping up. This was rolled back under Bush Jr when Powell's son was running the FCC. I wonder if this means other companies can move into these abandoned areas without the ILEC screaming like crazy?

With carriers having overcharged over 300 billion [newnetworks.com] who is then on the hook if there are no more landline companies? Of course telcom giants want people only on wireless, Verizon has been selling off their landline business for years....I wonder if this means other companies can move into these abandoned areas without the ILEC screaming like crazy?

No, the ILEC's won't scream. And no, no other companies will move in. Once all are converted to wireless, POTS will be forbidden by law... it 'interferes' with wireless networks somehow, all they need is a line item inserted into a 'farm aid' bill or similar that declares POTS installs of any kind to be dangerous to the wireless businesses... then they'll say "see, we can't do POTS because it's bad for you, we know it is because there is a law that says so"...

Think twice before you want to assume this mess. Ever seen inside those telco boxes? They are a mess of 50 year old wire, eroded, and crumbling. I have seen them in my neighborhood and wondered how the telco kept them running.

I think they are pricing landline use through the roof to get people to abandon their line, then they re-allocate the remaining working lines to the ones who have not jumped ship yet.

Personally, I think the landline infrastructure I have seen is rotten to the core, and is ine

1. All government services must be accessible at no cost via a method which is guaranteed to be available to any person. IOW if landline phone service isn't required to be universal then all government offices must have in-person hours and be staffed at a level sufficient to get everyone who shows up on any given day served before the office closes, or all services must be available via mail (postage pre-paid). Online-only services are not allowed, since the government isn't guaranteeing that everyone will receive Internet access. Phone-only services are not allowed since the government isn't guaranteeing everyone will receive cel phone service. Online-only or phone-only would only be allowed if the government mandated that everyone would be able to receive either Internet access or cel-phone service regardless of location. Which the service providers won't go for, since their whole goal is to avoid being legally required to provide service in unprofitable areas.

2. Any person must be able to get basic (local calling and 911 service) phone service at any address, regardless of where that address is, upon request at no more than the previous cost of equivalent landline service. Whether it be via cel or VOIP, the service must be available. Note that this doesn't completely get around requirement #1, since the basic service isn't guaranteed to provide access to government numbers. To the extent that it does, it would satisfy #1.

1 can never be adequately satisfied unless the phone company wants to be Oprah and give everyone a car. Even then, it's a bit of a problem to go to the police in person if someone is attempting to break in to your home.

Because most of us don't actually use it daily, or weekly, or monthly. I haven't had a landline in over ten years, including both my work and home phone numbers (my workplace uses VoIP).

I would say a first step is that the requirement be loosened such that the so-called POTS should be sufficient, but not necessary, to meet the requirements. The alternatives that could replace the POTS should not require an unreasonable sacrifice compared to keeping the POTS.

I live in an area where there is never going to be cable tv its uneconomic for them to lay cable this far out. DSL via the phone line is also not possible due to distance from the exchange and 3g barely works.Cell service is adequate for text messaging but making voice calls is tricky you have to be in precisely the right place for you and the person you are talking too to hear each o

Not when you have to call for an ambulance, I don't think a Radio would work, do you? Also I live in a City and have 2 cell towers about a mile and half away, and I have TO go out side and walk to the corner to anything over one BAR on my cell phone. It been that way for the last decade...

We were without power here for over a week after the Derecho a few years ago...this led to some fun (and very hot) experimentation. Some results:

- Most small-ish generators are loud, a bitch to maintain (a synthetic oil change every 30 hours? if you insist...), loud, expensive to fuel, loud, and difficult to fuel at first until (some) gas stations had proper gensets brought in from out-of-state, and loud.

- Cell service never blinked. Whatever they were doing for backup power, be it regular fuel delivery or natural gas, was working fine.

- That with a cheap (less-than-$20) unregulated solar panel from Lowes and the car charger for my Android phone (which accepts up to 24VDC according to its label), I was able to keep more than one phone going continuously even on a mostly-cloudy day just by putting the solar panel in an unshaded window. They charged normally (ie: in an hour or so), and the charge lasted about as long as it normally would (24 hours or so). (I learned all of this because of generators being loud and sleep being useful.)

- Our VDSL line never dropped. It never even thought about it, according to its accumulated stats. The modem/router/gateway/whatever-widget has a perfectly reasonable battery in its external DC power supply, which would get opportunistically charged whenever the generator was running (usually a just few hours/day to charge batteries for lights and make ice to keep the beer cold, though there was some running of dishwashers and window ACs as well). (Interestingly, the only reason it has its own battery is because we initially ordered it with a VOIP phone line. If we'd ordered just Internet, it would have died as soon as the power did.)

Our provider (Deathstar) had gensets at each VRAD cabinet, humming away quietly 24/7. Most of these were VERY shiny trailer-mounted rigs, but I did spot a couple of smaller portable ones. And I did my part, too, by opening up my AP and renaming it to "Free Wifi for Storm Victims" -- which actually served a fairly big area, since the 2.4GHz spectrum was remarkably interference-free.;)

By extension of all of this, I can quite safely assume that if I still had POTS, I'd have had a functional dialtone during that entire time: The CO plainly had power (and was built to withstand a war), and the VRAD cabinets (which also terminate some POTS lines these days) had power, and everything was proven to have connectivity....despite most of the telephone pairs and backbone fiber being overhead in these parts, and -lots- of trees down everywhere.

I got through that storm with multiple forms of uninterrupted communication just fine, just by using crap that I had laying around. I'd have done it just as well without a generator (which itself was just a lucky break), between the cheap solar panel and multiple vehicles and an inverter and charged SLAs and CFL lights that can run from them directly, full-conversion sinewave UPSs, and other stuff that I've accumulated just because I'm a geek.

And that, I guess, is the point: Even if one form of communication failed (multiple cell tower failure, OR VDSL failure), I'd still have been a happy camper without power. Me. Just me.

I have thus demonstrated that I, myself, don't need POTS. In my neighborhood.

But then, this is/., and I am therefore not normal. I also live in in a small city in mostly-rural Ohio where I have a fair variety of communication options and just enough density that a little bit of work on a provider's part will light up hundreds/thousands of people instead of dozens...or 1.

A 15-minute drive will take me to areas that are not so-blessed, and these folks still need POTS: The local loops are tens-of-miles long and can't support *DSL, there is no cable, cellular service (while normally quite good) is often served by a singular tower with redundant zero overlap, and any notion of "bandwidth" comes from an 802.11-based WISP which also has zero redundancy.

We were hit hard by Hurricane Sandy. The power at my house was out for 6 days. But cell towers were up the entire time (the closest one was down 12hrs, but calls could still be made with a weaker signal), and as soon as the water allowed physical access, Verizon rolled out trucks that parked at a few places in the neighborhood from 10am to 10pm where people could plug in power strips. About 100 people plugged in at any given time. Gave us a chance to talk to our neighbors, and recharge our devices to get on

User convenience problem. During an emergency everyone has a phone in their pocket. Everyone is not standing in the kitchen at the same time hence the POTS system goes under utilised. I have seen the POTS network come to its knees too, but that was before the days of ubiquitous cell phones.

Though this is all entirely irrelevant because if you've ever actually been in a disaster then you'd realise if you're at the point where you can't even get through to the tower then a) you're unlikely to get through to a

Typically on Mother's Day. According to colleagues who worked in the older phone systems, that was the busiest day of the year and was used as a very reliable test of the full capacity of the complete live system, every year. It was invaluable for finding unexpected choke points or poor load distribution throughout the system.

You are right about the wires but wrong about the demand pattern in case of a localized emergency.

For POTS, the telephone is at a fixed location (obviously close to the accident in the parent's example), therefore, in an emergency, the person is more likely to be trying to get help for an emergency which happened near or at that location.

Those with POTS are not calling to tell someone that they are going to be late coming home, because they already are home.

...these supercarriers need to be advised that any service they plan on replacing POTS with, will fall under common carrier regulation, and they will need to get approval from state regulatory boards for price modifications, service level changes, and the like. Under Common Carrier regulation, they will have to open up their service offerings to competitors at the same rates they charge their internal providers, i.e. their Internet Service capability will have to be available to companies like NetZero, at the same rates that they charge their own internal ISP organization.

They will also be obligated to build out their infrastructure to provide universal access to provide coverage to every customer they pull POTS services from. That's not to say that they can't make hybrid service available, where they provide some form of a wireless trunk to an equipment stack outside of town that provides local distribution in the same area that they already do this for with POTS. Essentially they will replace T1 trunk hardware at those remote vaults with a wireless T1 system, and presumably none of the customers would be the wiser.

Note, I don't expect that this is how things will play out, just how I think it should. I'm biased, as I am a customer who's worked in the telecom industry.

That's not an argument against regulations, it's merely an argument against putting horse judges and drinking buddies instead of professionals in charge of drafting, revising and enforcing regulations.

Bingo. And the precipitous drop in rate was not really a function of de-regulation, per se, but of the requirement that the lines had to be shared. The barriers to entry were lowered.

What we need is a full-on, forced corporate divorce of plant operations, provider/service/access operations, and content creation and distribution. You can't own more than one as a corporate entity at any level. Destruction of vertical integration offers only minor cost savings when compared to the cost increase a monopoly creates in the intellectual property area.

I'm in Silicon Valley, and cellular just doesn't work very well. At least not Sprint's CDMA network.

At home, I have to go to a window to get one or two bars, because the local community association doesn't want a cell tower nearby. I have a Sprint Airave box, which gives me a femtocell which mooches bandwidth from my IP connection. This gets me VoIP quality at cellular prices. If I lose Internet connectivity, I lose cellular connectivity. The Airave box is badly programmed; when it loses IP connectivity it still captures local handsets and insists it's the best path to the network. You have to disconnect its power to reach a cell tower instead.

At TechShop Menlo Park, which is adjacent to a major freeway, I have to get near a window to get coverage. I'm not sure why there's a coverage hole there.

For a long time, there was no Sprint coverage on the Stanford campus, because Stanford had an exclusive deal with AT&T.

I was in San Jose recently, near PayPal HQ, and couldn't get
Sprint connectivity until I drove up to a closed Sprint store. They have a femtocell so their demos work, and just outside the store, there was good connectivity.

Even when it works, cellular voice quality sucks. Sprint finally seems to have fixed their delay problem, though. For a while I was getting delays as long as a second, with delayed echoes coming back, like some low-end VoIP system.

The land line works great. Voice quality is very good, because it's only about 150 feet of copper to the big underground AT&T vault (the size of a shipping container, air conditioned, and full of racks of gear) out at the street. But there are no cellular antennas at that location; it's all wires and fiber.

At TechShop Menlo Park, which is adjacent to a major freeway, I have to get near a window to get coverage. I'm not sure why there's a coverage hole there.

Chances are, it's a steel-frame building. Which is probably the next best thing to a Faraday cage, plus whatever echoes and distortions the interior structure contributes. Then there's the questionable radio transparency of concrete floors and walls at cell frequencies.

It's when you're outside and the coverage is crap that your should be concerned/annoyed.

If interior coverage was that important to the company, I'm sure that they could arrange it.

You're forgetting the windows. Chances are that the windows are also coated in a thin metallic film (intended to reflect IR) to either keep heat out or in.

Can see that easily at my parents home - as long as the glass door to the garden is open, their handheld has a connection to the base station. Glass door is shut - connection to the base station is lost.

They want to be able to sell you wireless, internet, etc, etc. But if you look around, they're not going to let you out the door for anything less than $100 a month anymore.

I had a client trying to figure out why AT&T was charging her $400/month for 2 "business" POTS lines. They told her she could reduce her bill to $150 if she took 2 POTS lines and a DSL connection. She already had Comcast cable and a Comcast phone line. Adding 2 lines to the Comcast plan would have cost $70 (the first 3 lines are usually the most expensive). But damn if that AT&T person didn't try the hard sell!

Basically this is about shedding regulatory obligations and pumping the public for even MORE money. Make no mistake.They're still not promising universal coverage, coverage in underserved areas, higher speeds, etc. They're basically just trying to force the customers into paying more without the government coming down on them like a ton of baked shit bricks.

It's easy to say it's just the phone company pushing it but here in Norway there used to be 2.6 million land lines (PSTN/ISDN). In the last statistics (H1 2013) there's less than 600.000 and the trend has been >10% reduction each year, so probably less than 550.000 right now. Fiber and cable are growing, xDSL is dropping the moment people get alternatives. Practically everybody already have a cell phone and would never consider dropping it, so price wise you can be on the cell phone forever before you br

AT&T and Verizon have been abandoning rural phone for years now. They sell their rural territories and invest in metropolitan areas because there's less expense in metropolitan areas. The same equipment that serves 100 people in a rural area serves 10,000 in newyork. Yet it costs the same. These laws force AT&T to serve the rural customers they have.

If they do away with these laws then the only option rural customers will have (the majority of the country) is cellular if it's available... and in man

I realize you city dudes have a hard time with this idea but there are large swaths of the USA, and world, where there is no cell phone service. POTS is all we have and I had to lay a mile and a half of my own cable to get that. There is something called mountains that make radio, TV, cellular, WiFi and such not work so well.

Hope you all have backup power supplies in place for when the power goes for more time than your mobile battery lasts.

That used to be my argument for keeping a landline. But you know what? Even with old style phone service, people tend to not keep a corded phone around - they prefer wireless handsets. When the power fails, so do those phones. Even with a landline, the last few times we had a power failure I had to use my cell phone to call it in.

We finally dumped our landline last year. Well, actually, we still have the number - my wife won't let us get rid of it. But now we're only paying ten bucks a month to T-Mobile for

Mmm, yes, I while had cell phones that I mainly used when I still lived in the States; I also had a landline in my home. Two cordless phones in the house that used. However, I had a cheap corded phone that I just kept in a cabinet in case of an emergency. Like the 7 days we were without power due to an ice storm. Corded phone came out, I was able to keep in contact. Sure, I could charge my cell phone in the car, but I had to leave the car running to do that.

"We've already ramped up emissions by millions upon millions of times, and it's literally causing DNA and brain injuries, preventing curing of cancer, causing species decline and extinction, and other problems. The Schumann resonance which the earth produces and all life is dependent on is literally being over powered by microwaves and other EMF causing all these different phenomena, including conditions like anxiety and schizophrenia."

The Schumann resonance which the earth produces and all life is dependent on is literally being over powered by microwaves and other EMF causing all these different phenomena, including conditions like anxiety and schizophrenia.

Can I have some of what you're smoking? Whatever it is it sounds like it's good shit

Are you one of those people who use their cell or landline primarily for talking to people?

Most Millennials don't use voice frequently, but do use data. I have basically no need for a POTS line (or even a wireless service) that does not provide me with an internet connection.

And before you go full-luddite on me, yes, I *do* need net access when I am away from home. I don't use it while driving, but I do at practically all my destinations. I *don't* need to talk to people via phone, either at home or while o

Every ounce of copper infrastructure was paid for with YOUR tax dollars via tax breaks. That is what gace the Bell system a monopoly; that's why they got broken up - and that's why corrupt legislators paid off by the Bell subsidiaries reformed ATT.
The telcos have been charging excise taxes for years that are supposed to guarantee fiber infrastructure. They haven't - not nearly as they promised they would do.
I say nationalize telecommunications infrastructure, or force out the incumbents.
As for POTS: why give it up? It's there; like trolley lines in cities used to be there until we tore them up (and now we regret having done that). Leave the infrastructure in place.
The ONLY thing the telcos care about is their profit; they care about nothing else. If they want to eliminate a service, it is for their current senior management's benefit only. Remember that.

This is not how it works. I've called 911 on a cell recently, and on a land line around 10 years ago.
When I called on the land line, the operator asked, "Are you MY NAME?", which means she had my information INSTANTLY.
When I called on a "smart" phone, I had to tell the operator where I was, so she could forward me to the right jurisdiction, and there was a little hold time.
To me, this is a big difference, because the time I called 911 on the land line, there were two men trying to break my door down, and being put on hold would not have improved my confidence.

the time I called 911 on the land line, there were two men trying to break my door down, and being put on hold would not have improved my confidence.

Nothing says "get the F*** out of here" like the sound of a shell being chambered into a shotgun. It's universally understood and almost universally respected. If that fails to get the message across then the site and sound of a discharge from said shotgun is almost always enough. The first round in mine is always a blank, that way I can deliver a warning shot before laying down the lead. I can always call 911 after the invaders are dead. Forcible entry of uninvited guests, aka breaking down the door, is th

Speaking of which... do you have a recommended method of getting the shot delivered, before the perpetrators are finished breaking through the door?

I have a 357 magnum revolver that could probably penetrate the door, but I don't shoot at things I cannot see. It's dangerous and silly to try and shoot intruders you cannot see through walls or doors. This isn't the movies after all.

Often it takes the uninvited guests a while to complete the forcible entry due to the metallic cladding around the door, the high-security strike plates; additional steel reinforcement of the door frame, additional physical bolts.

Plenty of time for me to take up a good defensive firing position and make ready to lay into them as soon as they enter. I have the advantage of knowing the layout of my own home and the best firing positions so it's very likely that I would be able to fire several rounds befor

Speaking of which... do you have a recommended method of getting the shot delivered, before the perpetrators are finished breaking through the door?

I have a.30-06 that would easily go through the door, and through the intruder, and across the street, and maybe stop at the neighbor's stone fence. But you don't want to shoot at what you can't see, and.30-06 is not a great home defense round. Honestly, for most thugs, the sound of you racking a slide or loading a shell is probably enough to persuade them to pick another home to invade. If not, take up a good defensive position, and nail them as soon as they get through the door.